A Clinic on the Locked Room Mystery

 

             When the repulsive Lieutenant Lepean is killed in his locked room at Medbury Fort, with his spinal cord severed at the back of his neck, five men are suspected. His batman, Corporal Mason, has been humiliated by Lepean for having been a butcher in civilian life, and Lepean has been “walking out” with Mason’s girl in the town. Private Swansdick has been hazed and disciplined by Lepean over minor matters such as not saluting the lieutenant when in mufti. Lepean has cheated Lieutenant Harris at cards, and if Harris doesn’t come up with the hundred pounds he owes him, Lepean will go to his C. O. Captain Wape, the C. O., believes that Lepean has made unwanted advances to his sister and possibly raped her. The Medical Officer, Major Preece, is being blackmailed by Lepean for an infidelity several years before. This is the setup in The Medbury Fort Murder, by George Limnelius, a pseudonym for Lewis George Robinson.

            Limnelius, writing in 1929, invokes at least four different solutions to the locked room puzzle. One is Israel Zangwill’s solution in The Big Bow Mystery (1892): the murderer is the first man to break into the locked room and he commits the murder before others can see what he’s doing; then he announces that he’s “found” the murdered man. The investigators in this case, Scotland Yard Inspector Paton and his superior, Chief Inspector McMaster, consider this possibility, naming Zangwill as its origin.  A second method is to use a mechanical device to grasp and turn the key that’s inside the locked door, unlock it, do the murder and then relock the door using the same device. Another possibility is the murderer is already in the room before it is locked. He commits the murder and then either uses the mechanical method above to relock the door from outside, or he pretends it is locked, beats on it, and then forces it before others can see it is not actually locked. Yet another possibility, that several of the people who “find” the body are in collusion and kill the victim together, is briefly under consideration by the detectives before being dismissed. Agatha Christie famously used this method five years later in Murder on the Orient Express.

            Paton and McMaster solve the crime together, though they have to eliminate many false leads and they are fooled in at least one important detail by one of the witnesses. But McMaster is guilty of uttering this one preposterously snobbish remark: “In the history of crime there is no single case of a murder of violence having been committed by an educated man.”

            Limnelius/Robinson was an army man, and this is the first of several novels he wrote with a military setting. It seems to have been nearly forgotten before some discussions of it on the web and in Martin Edwards’s The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books in 2017 brought it some deserved new attention.